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Tessa turns around again and thinks about it the way she thinks about everything, highlighter held still over the page. “Yeah. I can see that. He walked into our room like he was looking for something.”

I nod. “That’s a good description, actually.”

“And then he found it,” she says.

I know what she means. Me. Which is ridiculous, because he came to our room to see me, so obviously he was looking for me.

“He likes you,” Tessa says.

“He likes fucking me,” I say lightly. It’s true. It’s the truest thing I know about Nash Kennebeck.

Tessa goes back to highlighting. I wait for her to say something else, are you sure or that’s not what it looked like, anything. She doesn’t. The highlighter squeaks across the page, and then again, and she caps it and uncaps a different color and keeps going, and the thing I said just sits there in the room with us with nobody arguing with it.

Fine. I pull the second boot off and drop it on the floor. It’s fine. I like fucking him too.

At seven, 412 is exactly as crammed as it was the first girls’ night and about ten times better. Bianca’s crockpot turns out to hold chicken, cheese, and an irresponsible amount of green chiles that she refers to only as the dip. It’s so good that twenty minutes in, Paige gives up on bowls and eats it straight out of the crockpot with a chip, because bowls were slowing her down.

We put on The Bachelor and talk through it. Kenzie tells us about her group project and the one guy who hasn’t done a single thing and keeps thumbs-upping the group chat. Bianca tells us her grandma is dating somebody new. Her mom had her young, and her grandma had her mom young, which means her grandma is fifty-seven and has a boyfriend named Rick who owns a boat. Somehow that turns into all of us deciding what we’ll be doing at fifty-seven. Paige will find somebody younger to keep her young. Kenzie would rather die than to be dating. Bianca points out that her mom is single right now, which statistically means Bianca is cursed to get pregnant young, so she refuses to sleep with anyone ever. She thinks she’s breaking the generational curse.

“I’ll be married,” I say, scraping the side of the crockpot with a chip. “Two kids, a boy and a girl. There’s no way I’m single at fifty-seven.”

“So you’ll stay even if he cheats on you?” Paige says.

“Paige,” Kenzie says.

Paige shrugs. “What? It’s not too soon. She’s not going to cry.” She looks at me. “Are you going to cry?”

“No. But I hope my future husband doesn’t cheat. God. That’s a real thing that could happen, isn’t it?”

“Men are fucking cheaters,” Paige says, flat. “My dad’s a cheater. I don’t trust men at all.”

Kenzie frowns down at her plate.

I blow out a breath. “I’m sorry, Paige.”

She waves a hand. “No. Fuck him. I just hope you’re better than my mom.”

“She stays?”

Paige nods. “Her excuses are disgusting. I can’t even look at her.”

“I’m sorry,” Kenzie says.

“I don’t want to talk about it. It makes me sick.”

So we don’t. Bianca asks Kenzie about her project, and the room fills back up with noise, and I sit there with a chip in my hand and don’t eat it. It’s easy to say you’d leave. I’ve said it about other people’s boyfriends for years, like it was obvious, like you just stand up and walk out a door. Then it was mine, and it wasn’t a door. It was his hoodie in my drawer and his mom’s birthday in my phone and a whole future I’d already picked out. I left. I did. But I know exactly how you’d stay, and exactly how reasonable the excuses would sound at the time. I look at Paige laughing at something Bianca said with her knees pulled up on the couch. She’s been holding Koda at arm’s length since the day I met her, even though she lights up every time her phone does. The chip breaks in my fingers.

“Kylie?”

I look up. “Yeah?”

“Fuck, marry, kill.” Paige is grinning at me. “Koda, Nash, Rafe. Go.”

I didn’t even know that’s what we were doing. “What’d you say?”

“I’m killing Rafe, because he gives those vibes. Nash, eh. Koda, marry.”

“You’d fuck Nash?”